The Surface Unsigned Festival is a rather massive live music competition running in Birmingham over the next few months.
The first heat starts on Monday with a series of 29 gigs at the Actress and Bishop running until the end of April. Each will have around six bands playing, making roughly 170 bands in this region. Two winners will be selected by the audience along with another two selected by the bands themselves.
These winners will then go through a second heat, a semi-final, and then a regional final where 12 bands play. The top four then go onto the national final “performing in front of a panel of Music Industry legends and A&R representatives” to win a top prize of £1,000.
Full details are here. The semi-final gigs take place at the Medicine Bar, the regional final at the Barfly with the national final occurring at an “Open Air Festival” in the Custard Factory lake.
The first round gigs are listed here. I guess the challenge is for anyone to go to all 29. It would certainly give a decent snapshot of the live music scene in the region. Hmm…